CAT
AND MOUSE TALES:

MGM's Tom and Jerry Cartoons

1940-1958

Part Nine - 1957-58

1957 - 58

IN-BETWEENERS

Tops With Pops
/ Timid Tabby / Feedin' the Kiddie / Mucho Mouse

The Tom and Jerry series petered out quickly in
the late
'50s, despite a handful of impressive productions.

Tops
With Pops is a Cinemascope remake of Love
That Pup.
The end was clearly near for the Tom and Jerry series when
remaking old T&J cartoons in Cinemascope were deemed to be more
profitable than making new ones.

And who knows? Maybe
it was the best course, considering the misfire Timid
Tabby,
in which Tom's scaredy cat cousin George comes to visit and is
immediately picked on by both Tom and Jerry for being afraid of mice.
I'm not sure what the point is of this cartoon or who the
butt of
the joke is supposed to be because it changes every minute.
The
only real memorable moment is when Jerry does a Jackie Gleason "Away we
go!" shuffle across the floor. Feedin'
the Kiddie was
another Cinemascope remake, this time of The
Little Orphan.

Mucho
Mouse is a bit
of an improvement, as World Champion Mouse Catcher Tom is called in to
catch "El Magnifico", the uncatchable mouse who lives in the home of a
Mexican woman. But it takes more than half the cartoon to set
up
the situation, and the gorgeously detailed backgrounds only serve to
point out how bland and characterless the streamlined Cinemascope Tom
and Jerry designs have become.

Tom's
Photo Finish
gets things back to basics, with Tom stealing food out of the
refrigerator, framing Spike for the theft, and trying to keep Jerry's
incriminating photo of the framing from falling into the hands of his
owners.

Spotlight: "Royal Cat Nap"

With Tom, Jerry, Nibbles, The King

The final Tom and Jerry to take place in Ye Olde France, Royal
Cat Nap has Tom once again battling "The Two
Mouseketeers", Jerry and
Nibbles (or is it Tuffy?). Not as visually impressive as the
previous entries of this sub-series, Royal
Cat Nap is still one of the
best of the final Tom and Jerry cartoons. The premise - the
usual: if Tom's owner (The King) is disturbed by one more
sound,
Tom will face punishment, this time this time a beheading.
So naturally the mice do their best to create havoc.

Royal
Cat Nap clearly borrows gags from other
sources. Several times, when Tom needs to scream out in pain, he runs
out of the castle and up a hill to be out of the King's earshot, a gag
used in several Tex Avery cartoons. Whenever the King does
wake
up, somebody is always singing a lullaby to get him back to sleep, a
gag used by, among others, The Marx Brothers in 1939's At the Circus.

Before Royal
Cat Nap, MGM released Happy
Go Ducky,
a cartoon in which Tom and Jerry are friends and must contend with
Quacker, who floods the house when his enthusiasm for swimming gets the
best of him. Directly after Royal
Cat Nap came The
Vanishing
Duck, in which Quacker and Jerry use vanishing cream to
annoy Tom,
before Tom turns the table on them using the same jar of cream.
If you like Quacker, these are okay cartoons. Robin Hoodwinked was the last of
the "high class" Tom and Jerry cartoons and a cousin to all those Ye
Olde France episodes like Royal Cat Nap
and The Two Mouseketeers.
It would be the next to last Tom and Jerry cartoon
of this era to be released to theaters.

Spotlight: "Tot Watchers"

With Tom, Jerry, Spike, Jeannie the
Babysitter, The Baby

Unfortunately, during the
production of this
below average film, the money-saving technique of releasing old
cartoons in lieu of new ones finally made MGM realize (perhaps wrongly)
that they no longer needed to maintain an animation department.
Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera soon moved to television, invented
"limited animation" and, quite unwittingly, changed the nature of
animation for the worse.

In hindsight, it would have
been more fitting to
end the series on the relatively high note of Robin
Hoodwinked.
Instead, the Tom and Jerry series sputtered to an end with
this
annoying sequel to Busy Buddies,
in which the cat and mouse have to
contend with a distracted baby sitter and a rambunctious baby.

MORE CAT AND MOUSE TALES

In 1960, MGM decided they needed a new Tom and Jerry series, and
outsourced production to Czechoslovakian animation director Gene
Deitch. From 1960 to 1962, Deitch produced thirteen new Tom
and
Jerry cartoons. This series is considered by some fans to be
horrible, by others to be oddly fascinating. There were
several
problems with the Deitch-era Tom and Jerry films. Made on a
very
small budget, they were often strangely surrealistic, with weird
animation and not of this earth sound effects. Deitch and his
animators were also not thoroughly familiar with the MGM cartoons, and
to add insult to injury, Deitch himself was not a fan of the old
series. To my mind, the Deitch-era shorts are just a step and
a
half above the ultra-cheap Popeye cartoons of the sixties.
What
saves them from being completely negligible are the very things that
make them unsatisfactory as Tom and Jerry cartoons - the cockeyed point
of view, the sometimes interesting way they worked around a low budget
(see The Tom and Jerry Took Kit,
a strange but fun variation of Chuck Jones's classic Duck Amuck, as an example) and the
sound effects and voices that would sound more in place somewhere in
the middle of a ghost story.

Next to take on the characters was Chuck Jones, the man responsible for
some of the greatest Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck cartoons as well as the
classic Road Runner series. Although he was one of the
greatest
cartoon directors of all time, even Jones himself felt out of place
directing Tom and Jerry cartoons. He was inheriting two
already
developed characters who were completely at odds with
the subtle,
witty style Jones had perfected on his own.

The 34 Jones films from 1963 to 1967
were of a
higher quality than the Deitch films, and were filled with Jones's
trademark subtle poses and facial reactions, but only a
handful
were good Tom and Jerry films.

Tom and Jerry went on to several
television
incarnations, most of them of the limited animation/ Filmation type.
There were several high quality specials, shorts and one TV
series produced from 2000 to 2008 that wisely took their style and
substance from the shorts of the 40s and 50s. Joe Barbera
himself
was a writer, story board artist and director for the 2006 theatrical
short The Karate Guard, a
winning return to the good old days.